Genius Recommendations Get a Thumbs-Up

You’ve got to be pretty confident about your product when you give it a name like “Genius.” But after spending the day with Genius, I see that Apple’s confidence in its music recommendation service is completely justified.

Genius helps listeners find music they would like, based on a current music selection, their previous purchases, and the purchases of every iTunes customer who participates. Genius works in two ways: first, it generates playlists from your library. Second, it recommends music that Apple thinks “goes with” your current selection. It’s available for iTunes 8 on your computer, as well as the latest iPod classic, iPod touch, 4th gen iPod nano, and part of the iPhone 2.1 software set to drop on Friday.

As my example, I used Broken by UNKLE (from the soundtrack of X-Files: I Want to Believe). The song, my current favorite, is a combination of rock and trip-hop.

From my own library, Genius pulled songs including Where You End by Moby; Avalon by Juliet; Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. I think these were excellent choices.

In fact, Genius also selected Lonely by Your Side by Azzido da Bass & Johnny Blake, an iTunes freebie that was buried within my 5000+ song library, which I had forgotten I owned.

And astonishingly, Genius pulled up Stoned in Love by Chicane, a song I downloaded from iTunes UK, isn’t available in the US, and which I’m not authorized to play on my iTunes account. The anonymity Apple promised is working. Color me impressed.

Then I refreshed the list. I didn’t like the second choices Genius made, but alas, I couldn’t find a way to retrieve the first playlist. I hope a Genius 2.0 rectifies this problem.

From iTunes, Genius pulled up songs with startling speed, as if it were anticipating my selection. iTunes offered to complete my X-Files soundtrack. It also suggested a popular UNKLE album, plus UNKLE’s top five songs. Genius also recommended one album and fourteen songs from a mixture of artists. As for the songs, I wasn’t inspired to purchase any of them, but I enjoyed the range of new music I was exposed to. However, the album is decidedly not to my taste.

Unfortunately there’s no way to tell Genius if I liked its selection or not, but if it lives up to its name it will fix this problem. Another reason why iTunes is only 95% successful: although iTunes recommends music based on my library, it doesn’t take into account songs I don’t like nearly as much. I’m suddenly motivated to rate my songs.

Maybe 94%. It took a half hour to upload my 5,000+ song library.

But the problems were minor compared to Genius' utter ease of use and the sheer delight I received from exploring new, yet familiar music.

Apple may be late to the recommendation game, but the company has an advantage as world’s most popular online music store: it has a massive amount of data to work from. Genius can’t help but be the #1 music recommendation service. But it just might be the best too.

Genius enhances iTunes and only further ties me to it. I honestly can't imagine my digital life without iTunes. It's been my focal point for 5 years now. I'm pleased to see Apple continue to enhance and innovate in this space and not just rest on its laurels.

All you need to do is select all the tracks in the genius playlist that is generated and drag them over to the playlist listing on the left and it will automatically create you a permanent playlist that you can rename. Cheers, C2